The City of Edinburgh will be the first to host an international promotion event of Rotterdam's innovative cultural policies for enforcing the participation of artists in heightening a city's competitiveness and securing social peace on the local level.

The essay 'Neo-Liberalism with Dutch Characteristics: The Big Fix-Up of the Netherlands and the Practice of Embedded Cultural Activism' is published in the book volume 'Culture and Contestation in the New Century'.

Read more about the Kanunnik Triest Square (designed by architects De Vylder Vinck Taillieu) in the Caritas psychiatric centre (Melle) and how it results from a participative process with psychiatrists, managers, staff, and patients.

Conference Utopia Today?

BAVO will deliver a key note speech at the conference 'Utopia Today?' at the Royal Salt Mines in Arc-et-Senans in France. The conference will take place on October 22, 23 and 24 2010. Other invited speakers include David Harvey and Peter Eisenman.

The conference wants to investigate why the notion of Utopia no longer seems to be used in architectural discourse and practice as a tool for progressive architecture. Its main contention is that in today's capitalist and neo-liberal world any change of the current state of affairs appears to be impossible. And that in this climate the only utopian practices that are still acceptable are either mapping exercises or micro-interventions in the urban realm. If anything, a dystopian vision of future ecological disaster is ruling the profession resulting in an obsession with eco-design or bio-architecture. The conference wants to offer diagnoses of utopia's absence as well as search for new approaches and definitions.

BAVO will address the contemporary phenomenon of Stakeholder Utopianism, a new form of practice which believes that architecture can still make a difference in today's neo-liberal world through a combination of stakeholder mediation and innovative architectural and urban design.

The conference is organized by the Ecole Spéciale d’architecture together with the Saline Royale and the Hochschule Luzern, Technik und Architektur.

For more information, go to the website or contact Andri Gerber: andri.gerber@artspatial.com.